Vincent Seeley, the president of the village of Catskill who recently floated the idea of closing the town's bars at 2am instead of 4am, is backing down, the Daily Mail reports:
“As of right now, [the idea] is dead,” Seeley said. “I am not going to pursue this anymore.”
Sullivan County planners have been looking into building a small creamery, hoping to help the county's few dozen remaining dairy farms survive.
Not so fast, says local economic consultant Marc Baez. The Sullivan County Democrat reported last week:
According to Baez’s calculations – using what he termed “very favorable assumptions” – a creamery would be lucky to break even unless it diversified beyond simply processing and shipping fluid milk.
“The economies of scale work against all but the smallest and most specialized operations (e.g. on-farm cheese production) developed incrementally from the ground up or the very largest of facilities such as operated by the major players in the market,” Baez wrote in his report.
“Small- to medium-size operations focused on fluid milk do not work, and even specialized facilities only work at a tiny scale.”
“Your best bet,” he told the IDA board, “is to focus on yogurt, cheese and premium ice cream.”
In today's Daily Star: A story on the kerfuffle over whospackingny.com, a new website that lists the name and address of every pistol permit owner in New York State. (In case you're wondering: "Is that a matter of public record?" -- why, yes, it is, in New York State. Some other states consider it private information, as this article on a similar dustup in Virginia notes.)
Local gun-rights advocates aren't too happy about the website:
The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association is working to shut down the website because of concerns that pistol owners will be targeted by criminals who will steal the firearms. The 70,000-member association had its annual meeting this weekend and pledged in a media release Monday to protect licensee's Second Amendment rights to bear arms "without the danger of their names and addresses being placed in the public domain."
Have cable phone through Margaretville Tel. Co.? Phone not working? You're not alone. My home phone in Andes has been out for at least an hour or so. I just got this email from them:
Sorry for the problem we are having a widespread outage on the cable phone service. Only affecting dial tone. We hope to have it resolved soon.
Full disclosure: My great-great-grandfather founded the Margaretville Telephone Company. Alas, this glorious lineage isn't going to get my phone line working any faster.
**Update: Phone's back in action. Huzzah.
Lots of local folks in the news lately for (allegedly) stealing stuff that doesn't belong to them. Here's a smattering:
-Anthony Gallo of Saugerties, charged today with stealing auto parts from his employer, Ulster County.
-Monticello duo Laurence Faust and Maceo Jones, whose parole officers are likely not too pleased about them allegedly assaulting and mugging a man on Forestburgh Road for $432.
-Also of Monticello, Harmeen Nix and an unnamed escapee, who's still on the lam after allegedly helping Nix pistol-whip a barbershop owner and stab his customer with a pair of scissors, in a robbery-turned-melee at the not so aptly named Low Profile barbershop.
With a price tag of $4.75 million, that's an average of just over $4,200 an acre. From yesterday's DEP press release:
The group of properties purchased includes parcels in Greene, Ulster, Putnam, Westchester, and Delaware counties. The acquisition of sensitive watershed lands is critical to maintaining the outstanding quality of the drinking water that 9 million New Yorkers rely on each day. Most of these properties will be opened for public access, including hunting, hiking and fishing, as well as hay cropping that helps local community businesses.
...The acquisition of 1,124 acres of land includes 488 acres in Greene County, 541 acres in Delaware County, and 93 acres in Ulster County.
According to the press release, the city now owns about 155,000 acres in the region surrounding its upstate reservoirs.
Councilman Jay Wenk took heat from an audience member at a meeting of the Woodstock Town Board last night for his longstanding habit of sitting during the recitation of the pledge of allegiance, the Daily Freeman reports. According to Wenk, he's not going to start standing and reciting until President Barack Obama repeals a slew of Bush-era injustices:
"My stated purpose in not making the Pledge of Allegiance is my public protest against the constitutional infringements that both George Bush has made and our current president has not rescinded, like habeas corpus and like the warrantless wiretapping," Wenk said. "I started making that protest while Bush was around," he said. "I’'m continuing it until the president rescinds those constitutional encroachments. To be silent, to me, would be to be complicit and to accept the status quo and I refuse to do that as a veteran, as a person. As a citizen it's outrageous."
Ulster County legislator Mike Madsen is steamed about the state legislature's proposed budget cuts to programs that counties and towns are mandated by law to run. Specifically, Safety Net:
Both the Assembly and Senate plan to cut $100 million in this area state wide. One house offers a straight cut, the other aims to use stimulus funding for one year before doing the same. Both proposals will have a tremendous impact on the county taxpayers across the state. More so for taxpayers in Kingston and Wawarsing because of our Safety Net burden structure...
...These programs are mandated. MANDATED! We must fulfill these duties.
Speaking of. Paterson told legislators this morning: There'd better be a state budget by June 28, or else.
At noon today, about 50 anti-gas-driling protesters hauled signs to the lawn in front of the Region 3 office of the New York Deparment of Environmental Conservation to call for a fracking moratorium. One of the speakers was New Paltz Central School District Board of Education member Daniel Torres, pictured below. Torres compared gas drilling in the watershed to the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, saying: "We don't need another Gulf Coast. Not in New Paltz. Not in Ulster County. Not in New York."
"Not in New Paltz": Daniel Torres protests fracking in New Paltz today.
The DRBC has put a stop to all Marcellus shale gas drilling throughout the Delaware River Basin, the AP reports:
The move temporarily halts all Marcellus drilling in the Delaware basin. The commission last month declared a moratorium on new shale drilling projects until regulations are drafted, but exploratory wells had been exempt.
Looks like the DRBC executive director Carol Collier thinks gas companies might have had sneaky plans:
She says it will also remove any incentive for gas companies to classify their wells as exploratory and sink them without DRBC review.
The Philly Inquirer has a longer story, and does a little explaining of the DRBC as an entity that straddles the borders of four states:
